NUAL SERMON 



.E the American Board of Commissioners 
for Foreign Missions 






By The 



1Rev>. IReuen ;bomas, 3D. 2>. 



r of Harvard Church 
Brooklfne, Mass. 



Delivered at Grinnell, Iowa 
October ii, 1904 




Glass. 



BVzc l 



Book 



PRESENTED BY 



Enlargement Through Service 

Hnnual Sermon 



Before the American Board of Commissioners 
for Foreign Missions 



By the REV. REUEN THOMAS, D. D. 

Pastor of Harvard Church, Brookline, Mass. 



DELIVERED AT GRINNELL, IOWA 
OCTOBER ii, 1904 




PUBLISHED BY THE BOARD 

14 Beacon St., Boston, Mass. 

1904 



3V'/,075 
45 



Gift. 






25MrT,5 



Enlargement Through Service* 

"OUR MOUTH IS OPEN UNTO YOU, O CORINTHIANS, OUR HEART IS ENLARGED. 
YE ARE NOT STRAITENED IN US, BUT YE ARE STRAITENED IN YOUR OWN AFFEC- 
TIONS. NOW FOR A RECOMPENSE IN LIKE KIND (I SPEAK AS UNTO MY CHILDREN) 
BE YE ALSO ENLARGED. " — II Cor. 6: II-IJ. 

As the Apostle himself had been. Coming~into living 
personal contact with the living Christ had enlarged his 
heart, opened his lips, set his life in another key and made 
him the great missionary to the Gentiles. In himself he was 
an illustration of that to which his nation was called — called 
in Abraham and in every great person and great event after- 
wards, "to be a light to lighten the Gentiles," that was Isra- 
el's glory. "In thee shall all the families of the earth be 
blessed, ' ' is the first recorded promise given him who among 
Jews and Christians bears the name of "the father of the 
faithful." 

National life'realizes itself to the full in great individu- 
als like Washington and Lincoln in America, Gladstone and 
Tennyson in England, Cavour and Leonardo in Italy, Thiers, 
Bossuet and Fenelon in France, Castelar, Murillo and Cer- 
vantes in Spain, Kant, Hegel and Bismarck in Germany. Ac- 
cording to the tone and quality of the supreme individual, so 
we may judge of the heart of the nation. We may infer of 
what the nation is capable. The best apple on the tree, not 
the worst, indicates what under favorable conditions of cli- 
mate and soil, the tree can do. A degenerate cannot fairly 
indicate the possibilities of manhood. That to which the 
Hebrew nation was called is more clearly seen in Paul than 
in Rothschild. Any nation with great spiritual possibilities 
hidden in its constitution will produce great men of all kinds y 



4 Enlargement Through Service 

(as a field that will grow good wheat will also yield big 
weeds,) for the spiritual is the vital. The country that pro- 
duces great poets and great philosophers will produce great 
generals and great statesmen. The nation that produced 
Paul and Isaiah produced Moses and David and more modern 
men great in all departments of literary, civil and commercial 
life. 

But a nation may fall away from its highest ideals and 
therefore from its noblest practicabilities. Only a few of its 
people may attain to the glories of which it was capable, and 
forevermore stand as witnesses of the nobility which pulsed 
at the heart of the people whom God had called, — for it re- 
mains true for all generations that out of the many who are 
called only a few hear, recognize the voice as that of God, 
rightly interpret and obey the call. 

In Paul we see what that great Hebrew people might 
have been — the supreme missionary nation of the world. In 
his own person Paul represents the real heart of his race — at 
once an illustration and a condemnation. He met with the 
Christ. It enlarged his heart. It opened his lips. It devel- 
oped his humanity into pre-eminence. He became the Apos- 
tolic Missionary to the Roman world. 

Now, if looking at our theme of the Enlargement that 
comes to the mind and heart of all who are practically associated 
with foreign missions, historically, we find that the Jew 
failed through his refusal to be a foreign missionary, the dis- 
covery may have the effect of creating in us a distrust and a 
fear that shall be wholesome. For, in these days we have 
great confidence in what we assume to be "common sense" 
and we are not sufficiently afraid of losing that spirituality, 
the possession of which is necessary to all great perceptions 
and achievements in all departments of things. If only we 
can create a suspicion that this so-called "common-sense" of 
ours is oftentimes a very narrow and selfish thing and that the 
loss of spirituality reduces us to the condition of those to 
whom our Lord refers when he says "having eyes they see 
not, having ears they hear not, neither do they understand," 
the way will be open for some of those larger and more 



Enlargement Through Service 5 

humane views of life and duty and privilege, which bring 
greatness into the mind and life of all who are possessed by 
them. 



I. 

When we study carefully the Old Hebrew Scriptures es- 
pecially the production of those most remarkable men, the 
prophets of Israel, it is impossible to escape the recognition 
that Israel had a unique calling, involving a mission to the 
world. Gradually we come to see that she clung tenaciously 
to the idea of a world relation. She cherished all the fine 
and comforting words about redemption from Egypt for a 
great purpose, all words about electing love, special provi- 
dence, Divine jealousy over the nation, all words that im- 
plied her own distinctiveness and superiority — all these she 
cherished fondly — until pride and exclusiveness developed into 
obstinacy and impermeability of character, and the high 
ideals gradually receded, or took on a mere political complex- 
ion. No study is more instructive than that which the late 
learned Hebraist, Dr. A. B. Davidson of Edinburgh, enables 
us to make in his great book on "Old Testament Prophecy." 
Under his guidance it is almost impossible to fail of the rec- 
ognition that the Hebrew people were intended to be the great 
missionaries to the world at large, that their call was to evan- 
gelize the nations and to proclaim a Kingdom of God whose 
characteristic elements should be justice and universality. 
Except in the persons of their poets and prophets they fell 
away from their high calling. They never lost the sense of 
privilege and superiority. They became selfishly aristocratic. 
They indulged in self-flattery and self- congratulation. Their 
character gradually lost its noblest elements. A political 
selfishness mastered them. They became imperialistic in 
their hopes and anticipations — imperialistic but unspiritual. 
Their very religiousness became less and less what it is in the 
Psalms of David and in Deutero-Isaiah, and hardened itself 
into an orthodox formalism which must not be criticised or 
disturbed. Pharisaism became inevitable and Sadduceeism 



6 Enlargement Through Service 

also. One extreme always produces another. The two will 
combine when once a Jesus Christ comes reviving and illus- 
trating the higher spirit from which men have degenerated — 
but ordinarily, though they move towards the same blind- 
ness, between them is a great gulf fixed. 

If we knew what Israel's true mission was, nowhere bet- 
ter than in the second part of the Book bearing the name of 
Isaiah can we find it. "Nations shall come to thy light, and 
kings to the brightness of thy rising." This is the true im- 
perialism — not political — not military — not the imperialism of 
force — not Roman — more Grecian than Roman — more Hebrew 
than either — for this was the old Hebrew mission, to be the 
light bearer to all the nations of the earth. Not to rule over 
the nations, to rule in them. There is a difference. Power 
is one thing, influence is another. The more spiritually un- 
developed a man is, the more he is fascinated by the showy 
vulgarities of power. But it demands a prepared mind ade- 
quately to estimate influence. "Nations shall come to thy 
light and kings to the brightness of thy rising." "I will 
make thy officers peace, and thy exactors righteousness. Vio- 
lence shall no more be heard in thy land, desolation nor de- 
struction within thy borders; but thou shalt call thy walls 
Salvation and thy gates Praise. Jehovah shall be unto thee 
an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory." — That is the 
true imperialism, the imperialism of the Sun in the heavens, 
an imperialism which the old Hebrews could not appreciate, 
from which they fell and in falling lost their spiritual dis- 
tinctiveness. Their eyes were covered with cataract. Vis- 
ion failed them. Only among a remnant did it linger to show 
what might have been. Is not this one of the great mysteries 
of Providence, that a nation can be called to the noblest des- 
tiny and fall from it? The fact seems to cast a shadow on the 
Divine competency to foresee and foreordain. "Seems!" But 
we must not dogmatise. St. Paul saw a Divine purpose work- 
ing even through the temporary rejection of Israel, while he 
himself and others illustrated the great old truth that "Salva- 
tion is of the Jews." All we have to do on this occasion, 
with this great and mysterious history, is to note the fact 



E?ilargetuent Through Service 7 

that nations and churches may fall from their high calling, 
miss their way, lose their opportunity, become flawed, like the 
clay in the hands of the potter, and serve only some lower 
purpose than that for which it was originally designed. "Be 
not high minded, but fear; for if God spared not the natural 
branches, neither will he spare thee. Behold then, the 
goodness and severity of God, toward them that fell, severity; 
but toward thee, God's goodness — if thou continue in his 
goodness; otherwise thou also shalt be cut off." The Jew- 
ish history as given in the Old Testament records, has in it 
something more than a hint or suggestion — a very palpable 
warning — that when God's people refuse to use the truth 
given them in a great human way for others, the stranger, 
the foreigner, and specially for those who need it most, they 
lose it. All greatness is known by its unselfishness. An 
ecclesiasticised spirituality is a Judaized spirituality. In the 
spiritual region exclusiveness is death. Only the grace of 
God can make a man a missionary, but the missionary is the 
most apostolic type of man. Genuine Christianity begins at 
Jerusalem but it stops not till its rays shine to "the utter- 
most parts of the earth." We cannot retain what we are 
unwilling to use according to the Divine intention for its use. 



II. 

This historical introduction is, of course, intended to 
have personal application. My next point is the influence of 
Foreign Missions on ourselves. Have they brought us enlarge- 
ment ? Have they liberated us from fetters ? Under their 
influences have we grown intellectually ? Have they broad- 
ened our theology ? Have they widened our view ? Have 
they brought us into sympathetic relations with men and 
women whose lives are'^spent under conditions very different 
from our own ? In a word, is our humanity of finer and 
nobler quality than it would or could have been but for our 
interest in foreign missions ? 



8 Enlargement Through Service 

These questions are necessary. For have we not fallen 
upon days in which we have to do all that in us lies to make 
it evident, even to many, (I fear the majority) of our semi- 
Christianized people, that foreign missions are not only con- 
sistent with the truth we hold, and the times in which we 
live, but that we should, if we refused them, be behind our 
age ? For Foreign- Missionariness is not confined in our day 
to aggressive church action. It belongs to all departments 
of our social life. Books are translated into all languages. 
Men whose specialty is scientific are invited to be professors 
in the universities of Japan and India and China, and with- 
out the slightest hesitancy on the ground that they have not 
yet illuminated the minds of their own countrymen — the 
great majority of us being still scientifically heathen — they 
readily accept the invitation, "Come over and help us." 
The American manufacturer is most sensitively nervous lest 
foreign ports should be closed against his wares, believing 
with all his heart in free trade everywhere but at home. His 
sympathies to-day in this most fearful and . bloody eastern 
conflict, are with the little brown man from Japan rather than 
with the burly blue -eyed Russian, almost solely on the 
ground that the Mikado and his people are favorable to the 
door through which he can convey his goods being kept in- 
vitingly open. Are not these men flagrantly, almost ludicrous- 
ly inconsistent, when they object to our sending something 
of infinitely greater value than they themselves trade in, 
wherever we can find a market for it ? If, when God puts 
that vital spark into a man which makes him a missionary, 
we should refuse to have anything to do with this manifesta- 
tion of the Spirit of God in man, would not the distinguished 
literary men, the ardent scientific men and the enterprising 
merchants of our day have abundant reason to twit us with 
our belatedness, with our unadaptedness to the times in 
which our lot is cast ? Would it not be open to all wide- 
awake men of all kinds to despise us as mere dwarfs of Chris- 
tians, in no sense representative of the cosmopolitan largeness 
of Apostolic Christianity ? The day has gone by when the 
Foreign Missionary can be regarded with wonder and amaze- 



Enlargement Through Service 9 

ment as a man of singularly fanatical temperament and 
unbalanced mind. Men and women in our day who do not 
see how worn out, stale and musty, the old objections to for- 
eign missions are, must have been spending their time in a 
Rip Van Winkle sleep, for in our day enterprising men of all 
kinds, literary, scientific, political and mercantile are in their 
own order foreign missionaries. I know that with some peo- 
ple, good people too, the case is hopeless. All we can do 
with such is so to put our claim that, in their most serious 
hours, they may begin to question whether the light in them 
may not be darkness. 

Having paid our respects — in the spirit of true Christian 
courtesy, we hope — to the objectors to foreign missions and 
suggested how hopelessly behind the age a non-missionary 
church is, let us pursue a line not so much hackneyed as 
some to which on similar occasions to this we have been often 
invited, and ask as to the influence of Foreign Missions upon 
ourselves. 

First of all, in enlarging our ideas, and deepening our 
emotions, as the worship faculty in human nature has been 
revealed to us everywhere existent. It is impossible to come 
upon the fact of the universal religiousness of humanity 
and not be so impressed by it that our thinking shall not 
be broadened and our feelings made more cosmopolitan. 
Wherever we have gone we have found religious men and 
women — men and women more religious than ourselves, sac- 
rificing more and suffering more for their religion than we 
sacrifice and suffer for ours. Some of these religions were 
horrible ; they were so inhuman. But they revealed a capac- 
ity for sacrifice and service which only needed to be enlight- 
ened, directed and guided to secure results which would 
gladden the hearts of the noblest men and women of Chris- 
tian instinct and training. The question at the basis of all 
such efforts as this and kindred societies make, is this, are 
these other inhabitants of our planet men and women like 
ourselves, in whom there are evidences of the Spirit of God 
working, or are they beings of another nature and order? 
Are they simply bipeds with a more developed instinct than 



io Enlargement Through Service 

the quadrupeds, or are they spirits to whom the Spirit of 
God can appeal ? Is it not this capacity for religiousness 
which determines the nature and quality of any being you 
meet, here or there, in Boston or in the Xew Hebrides ? 
The religiousness of these we have termed ''heathen," "sav- 
ages," "pagans" is it not something painfully pathetic? 
That it should so often be something full of exaction aud de- 
mand, with no consolation in it, no inspiration, a driving 
power in it but no subduing and cleansing power, supplying 
no anaesthetic in the deepest sorrows and agonies of life, is it 
not pathetic ? Has it not in it a fervency and immediacy of 
appeal which in our tenderest moments becomes almost irre- 
sistible ? That the religious faculty should have become so 
perverted and distorted as to add savageness to savagery and 
make superstition more cruel and tyrannical — is there not 
something in this which appeals and appals ? So religious 
yet so cruel, so religious yet so blind — who would not if he 
could, go to such as these, and. putting the very best con- 
struction possible upon their doings, say in the language of 
the great apostolic missionary ' 'whom therefore ye ignorantly 
worship, him declare I unto you?" Recognizing their relig- 
iousness, their capacity for sendee and sacrifice, yet recogniz- 
ing also their ignorance, their darkness, their' consequent 
cruelty, cruelty sanctified by superstition — in this attitude of 
mind and with these humane sympathies, does not the mis- 
sionary of Christ seem to be the one man for whom no apol- 
ogy is needed ? If there were no religiousness in these people, 
the case would be different. If they were incapable of wor- 
ship we might argue them out of the great human family, 
but the appalling character of their religiousness supplies an 
argument of its own kind which no Christianized heart, one 
would assume, would be able to resist, 

I am free to say, (and you will receive it or reject it ac- 
cording to the intellectual quality of your sympathies) that 
this knowledge which has come to us, through missionary en- 
terprise, of religious capacity in men everywhere, has done 
more than anything else to broaden and sweeten our theology 
at home, and to give it a dignity and breadth which, for a 



Enlai'gement Through Service n 

time, it seems to have lacked. We have developed a more 
aposoltic temper and feeling. Our simple apostolic ecclesias- 
ticism cannot give us distinctiveness and save us from use- 
lessness, unless we have something of that sweet reasonable- 
ness, joined with the holy fervor and intellectual grasp by 
which the first great Christian missionary was characterized. 
The greatest missionaries have been men who seemed to be 
incarnations of the 8th of Romans, and the 13th and 15th 
chapters of the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians. When I think 
of Robert Moffatt, Duncan of Metlakhatla and Dr. Paton of 
the New Hebrides — all of whom I have personally known — 
I can realize, as never before, Paul himself. He is no longer 
an ideal simply, a unique personality appearing once in his- 
tory never to be paralleled. Whatever relation the one fact 
has to the other, yet to some of us it is all but clear that our 
more perfect knowledge and more sympathetic appreciation 
of the religiousness of the men and women among whom our 
missionaries have gone (and all which this fact involves,) 
have helped us all the more intelligently to interpret the Mas- 
ter and his disciples, and have brought us into an apprecia- 
tion of that sweet, sane and comprehensive apostolic theology 
much of which had become, through the too complete domi- 
nation of high-calvinistic logic, "cabined, cribbed and con- 
fined." The only thing that Calvinism needed was to be 
humanized. It was all skin and bones. It needed to be 
clothed with flesh. The religious capacity everywhere re- 
vealed in savage and heathen lands has introduced a climate 
in which it can once more live and flourish with a healthy 
human look on its cheek. 

In the second place, if foreign missions have expanded 
our intellect and deepened and mellowed our humanity, they 
have also tested our faith in the Divinity and consequent 
Sovereignty of Christ. In the realm of the intellectual and 
emotional, whatever tests, strengthens. We see as we have 
never seen before, that to confine the Sovereignty of Christ 
by any race-limit is to deny the essential unity of humanity. 
In a word, it is to deny the Divinity of our I^ord. Whoever 
limits the range of missions, limits the range of the "grace of 



12 Enlargement Through Service 

God." That, I know, is a serious accusation. To stop short 
of foreign missions, to confine our interest to missions at 
home, is to affirm Divine limitations which we have no power 
to affirm. We don't know enough to limit the grace of God. 
If we are to err at all it is always better to err on the side of 
largeness than of narrowness. Our estimate of the person of 
Christ is certain to influence our hopes and expectations as to 
the range of applicability of Christian truth. If the range of 
our Lord's prophetic vision is limited to that of any other 
man, even the greatest of men. how do we account for those 
prophetic world-wide generalizations which abound in the 
Xew Testament, ,% This gospel of the Kingdom shall be 
preached in all the world," "As long as I am in the world I 
am the light of the world," "The Lamb of God that taketh 
away the sin of the world." Such language is too original, 
too large, too sweeping, too comprehensive to have originated 
elsewhere than in that Eternal Mind which saw the end from 
the beginning and humanity in its final unity. A mind 
which accurately sees what is, and prophetically sees what 
shall be, sees primary causes and their inevitable conse- 
quences, sees details working themselves into a larger unity, 
sees the end from the beginning, sees the whole in one view, 
— that mind is not of the stature of yours or mine, not even 
of the stature of Xewton or Bacon or La Place or Confucius, 
or Plato or Isaiah or Moses. It is a mind of another order, 
even as the mind of man is of another order from the mind of 
the noblest animal. It includes the animal but transcends it. 
And so the mind of Jesus includes the human but transcends 
it. According to the personality of Christ so will be the great- 
ness of his teaching. The response which in so many mission 
fields, by men of all races and tongues, has been made to the 
claim of the Master, is an evidence of prime value to the 
Divinity and Sovereignty of the Christ we preach. He knew, 
as no one ever knew, before his time or since, the human 
heart and its needs. And if we want to be brought out from 
our intellectual prisons into the daylight, if we want to be 
liberated, enfranchised, enlarged, we must keep close to 
Christ, appropriate his thought, use his great language, fill 



Enlargement Through Service 13 

ourselves full of his ideas, cherish his purposes, and throw 
ourselves into the stream of the great human movement he 
inaugurated and sustains. There is no other way of attain- 
ing to goodness and greatness. "He that doeth the will (he 
only) shall know of the doctrine." The evidence for the 
Divinity and Sovereignty of Christ is ampler to-day than it 
has ever been, for voices in all languages and from all climes 
are witnessing to "renewing grace and dying love." 

In the third place, it is necessary to take a glance at 
foreign missions as attesting the growth-fulness of the faith 
faculty in the Christianized man. Growth-fulness is the only 
test of healthy life. The faith faculty when alive cannot 
always be as a grain of mustard seed. It become th a tree. 
There are stages in its development. To begin with, a 
Christian man may be selfish, caring only for his own salva- 
tion. Upon this he may in time, as thoughtfulness increases, 
make some advance, become patriotically home-missionary 
in his sympathies, and under a feeling of alarm for the safety 
of his nation from the lawlessness that invariably attends 
irreligion, become practically sympathetic with everything 
that aims to arrest degeneracy among the citizenship of his 
own state and country. His faith is growing, enlarging. He 
is out of the prison of selfishness, not much superior, how- 
ever, to a Jew of the best period before Christ, who was 
intensely anxious about his own country-men, but unsym- 
pathetic and even hostile to all men of other nations. In 
every one of us there is a Jew and a Pagan needing to be 
skillfully dealt with. Not till the disciple of Jesus becomes 
cosmopolitan is his faith of a quality to which the word 
"Christian" can be consistently applied. When he attains 
to the Saviour's view of humanity as a whole, then his faith 
is enlarged, as was that of Paul after his experience on the 
road to Damascus. Then his faith becomes genuinely Chris- 
tian. Then he is able intelligently to read the parable of the 
good Samaritan — not till then. Then he enters into living 
fellowship with Paul and John and Peter. Then all sectar- 
ianism, all mere nationalism, all racial prejudice weakens and 
ultimately breaks down. He understands what John Wesley 



14 Enlargement Through Service 

meant when he said, "The world is my parish." Sym- 
pathetically he becomes the brother of all men who have 
spiritual needs. Thus we may test the sufficiency and ripe- 
ness of our faith by the sympathy we have for man as man. 
Man is never humanized until he is Christianized. And he 
is never Christianized through and through so long as his 
obedience to the Christ lacks spontaneity, and that earnest 
willingness which is worthiness, for "if there be first the 
willing mind it is accepted according to that a man hath and 
not according to that he hath not." So long as our Chris- 
tianity is simply personal, of the nature of an insurance 
policy in a mutual life office, or simply parochial, or even 
simply national, it fails of attainment to the dignity and 
greatness of apostolic Christianity. If our Christian disciple- 
ship does not make us in every way greater as well as better 
men than we should be without it, greater intellectually, 
greater sympathetically, practically greater, there is some 
serious defect in our personal relation to the Christ. We 
have not attained to that spirituality which an Apostle glori- 
fied when he wrote, "He that is spiritual discerneth all 
things, yet he himself is discerned of no man," a passage in 
which he gives pre-eminence of perception and judgment to 
the man who is ruled in his thinking and feelings and plan- 
nings and purposings by the Christ of God. Every other 
man is a slave. This man is a free man. He has but oiie 
Master, whose service is perfect freedom, others have many 
masters and cannot even call their souls their own. Nothing 
so frees a man from the littlenesses and frivolities of life, 
nothing so enlarges his being, as association with some cause 
whose greatness is impressive, even superhuman — to all but 
men of Christian faith, Utopian. And what greater is there, 
what seemingly more impossible than the bringing of all men 
of all nations and climes to bow the knee to Him who, in the 
Divine constitution for humanity, is King of Kings and Lord 
of Lords ? As a test of faith\and loyalty to the Master is there 
anything to compare with it ? It is when rationalists tell us 
that our expectations are unreasonable, when men occupied 
with the material outsides of things tell us that we are 



Enlargement Through Service 15 

dreamers and enthusiasts, when scoffers laugh and the 
"enemies of the cross of Christ, whose god is their belly, who 
mind earthly things" pick up stones to stone us — it is then 
we may be assured of being right, for so treated they the 
Master Himself. Faith in Christ has conquered before, in 
other ages, when Christianity seemed hopelessly discredited, 
and it will conquer again. Nothing tests our faith and our 
courage, nothing strengthens them, like this amazing effort 
to win the peoples of the world for Him to whom by right 
they belong. 

For myself, I am not exclusively concerned for "the 
heathen" as we call them, although the term is sometimes 
most unjustly applied, with no sufficient discrimination be- 
tween peoples who have been mentally trained in old philos- 
ophies, and others who have never been developed beyond 
the cruelties and vices of savagery. Remembering how much 
of good has come to us from foreign missions in the enlarge- 
ment of our sympathies, in the humanizing of our theologies, 
and in the strengthening and perfecting of our faith, — my 
concern is for ourski^vks, lest in these days of irreverence 
for old institutions which enshrine and conserve great truths, 
in these days when science is winning triumphs which seem 
miraculous, and when the old mediaeval dogmatism of the 
priests of the church has passed to the priests who minister 
at the altar of science, when every man who is to be an 
authority of any kind must be a specialist, a man confined to 
one region of things, with no time or capability for any large 
outlook upon other contiguous regions, — in these days when 
mere money-making is the most absorbing of all pursuits, 
bringing to the successful so much social distinction, — in 
these days I am concerned for OURSELVES, lest we should 
lose all that we have gained, and degenerate in high intelli- 
gence, in great human sympathies, in spirituality, and in the 
faith which removes mountains, — lest we should become mere 
" common sense rationalists," incompetent for any great spir- 
itual enthusiasms. May I be allowed in this connection, to 
quote from an exceedingly supercilious and haughty man of 
the nineteenth century (whom his friends call the "the apos- 



1 6 Enlargement Through Service 

tie of culture"), words which seem to support this conten- 
tion? ' ' The individual (he writes) while striving after his 
own development, is required, on pain of personal deteriora- 
tion, to carry others along with him in his march toward 
perfection, to be continually doing all he can to enlarge and 
increase the volume of the human stream sweeping thither- 
ward. Culture has one great passion, the passion for sweet- 
ness and light. It has one even greater! the passion for 
making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a 
perfect man ; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few 
must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of 
humanity are touched with sweetness and light." Substi- 
tute for ' ' culture ' ' the word ■ 'religion' ' which aims at soul- 
culture, and the ideas are ours more fervently than his ! 
Other words of the same tenor might be quoted from the 
same source, evidencing that, from a high literary point of 
view, we are eminently sane and respectable. 

Or if again we needed support from Philosophy, one of 
the most erudite of the tribe might safely be invited to our 
platform to tell us that the greatness of any true Idea is in its 
refusal to be the mere ornament of any individual, "It seeks 
to flow forth in the whole human race, to animate it with new 
life and to mould it after its own image." (J. G. Fichte) 

Said I not truly that we must take the alarm whenever 
we find men inclined to parochialize or nationalize Christian 
truth, for only as we give it to others can we retain it our- 
selves ? You may imprison darkness — you cannot imprison 
light. If Christ is the Light, he is the light of the world. 

The application of these truths to the mood of our times 
need not detain us for very long. We are sometimes dis- 
couraged, even dolefully so, when we find how little impression 
even our most fervent and labored appeals make upon men 
and women who by their regular attendance on church services 
and in other ways, seem to be susceptible to the magnetism 
of the Cross of Christ. The longer we live and the more 
varied and developed our ministerial experiences, the more 
convinced we become that there is something mysterious and 
unintelligible in this human nature of ours. That men 



Enlargement Through Service 17 

should be found who can plead our slovenliness and incapac- 
ity at home for our neglect of mission work abroad, is one of 
those perplexing conditions of mind which would depress us 
beyond recovery were it not that there is a humorous side to 
it by which we are saved from regarding it too seriously. 
Very few men have occupied a conspicuous place in the 
Christian pulpit whose mental balance was more constantly 
preserved than in the case of Phillips Brooks. And yet on 
one occasion as he contemplated the meanness of this kind of 
objection, his indignation got the better of him, and in some 
of the most severe and pointed words he ever used, he broke 
out into a severity of rebuke which must, I think, have 
electrified the more susceptible of his hearers. " ' There are 
heathen here in Massachusetts,' you declare, 'heathen 
enough here in America. L,et us convert them first before 
we go to China.' That plea we all know, and I think it 
sounds more cheap and more shameful every year. What 
can be more shameful than to make the imperfection of our 
Christianity at home an excuse for not doing our work 
abroad? It is as shameless as it is shameful. It pleads for 
exemption and indulgence on the ground of its own neglect 
and sin. It is like a murderer of his father and mother ask- 
ing the judge to have pity on his orphanhood." 

Of course the position we take — that the truth we hold 
in trust is for all men everywhere — will be met by those 
who in our own country do not receive it, with lofty indiffer- 
ence or supercilious scorn. So much we must expect. A 
man who had been in India said to a missionary, ' ' I have 
been in India twenty years and never saw a native Chris- 
tian." "What were you doing?" asked the missionary. 
* ' I was shooting tigers. ' ' ' ' And I," retorted the missionary, 
"have been in India thirty years and I never saw a tiger." 
Men usually find what they seek. There is testimony and 
testimony. Some of it is worse than valueless, such testi- 
mony as would never be for a moment considered in a court 
of law, or by any fair-minded man anywhere. If we needed 
any argument from the SUCCESS of the work so far as it has 
gone, considering the prejudices to be overcome, the difhcul- 



1 8 Enlargement Through Service 

ties of language learning, of obtaining a sympathetic and 
intelligent relation to the mind and heart of the people, of 
mental adjustment to new orders of intellect and new condi- 
tions of life, the success of foreign missions has been enough 
to prove that the gospel of Jesus Christ is intended for all 
men because it is adapted to the deepest needs of all men. 
These arguments from success are the only ones which 
appeal to the commercialized intelligence. But for minds 
which have become spiritualized, through the worship and 
service of the Christ, this argument from success is comfort- 
ing but secondary . ' ' Success ' ' is not a New Testament 
word, "faithfulness" is. We have a trust to administer. It is 
required in stewards that a man be found faithful. 

I have preferred to put the emphasis of this discourse on the 
influence of foreign mission work on ourselves, on the devel- 
opment of our own spiritual life, on the mental and spiritual 
enlargement which we need for more effective work in our 
churches at home. We want for our own sakes, something 
which shall fire the imagination, something great enough to 
put a tax on all our faculties and powers and strain them 
almost to the breaking point. We want something which 
shall inspire and demand heroism, something which the un- 
spiritualized mind cannot understand, something at which 
very safe and prudent men will laugh. We are in danger of 
becoming unheroic and commonplace. Men die for the sake 
of commerce, for scientific ends, even for political, literary 
and artistic ends. By wholesale they die in war, war that is 
often worse than useless, criminal, in the most wholesale and 
intense use of the word. And if we have no men and women 
who are willing to die on the mission field in God's service 
and for man's redemption, we may as well dismiss the officers 
of our American Board and confess that the Spirit of God has 
withdrawn his higher inspirations from our churches. A life 
like that of James Chalmers, a grand, manly, fascinating, 
heroic personality like that, crowned with martyrdom, is of 
immense value as evidence to the unmistakable call of God 
in sane men, and that apostles are not confined to the first 
century of our era. It is pitiable when such a life produces 



Enlargement Through Service 19 

no impression on men. We need the romance, the unworld- 
liness, the heroism of foreign missions, to save us from the 
domination of the lower side of our own semi-Christianized 
personality, from selfishness, narrowness of view, and all 
those pettinesses which, mosquito-like, are everlastingly 
buzzing and biting in the corridors of our churches. The 
other day I was reading an address on foreign missions 
spoken in Scotland by an English pastor whose church in 
London has the largest membership of any in the metropolis. 
I was impressed by these words, "The growth of the church 
of which I am the minister began from the point in which I 
insisted that the missionary work in the foreign fields must 
be first and foremost in all their thought and in all their con- 
tributions." That, it seems to me, is a testimony which we 
do well not to ignore. It may also furnish consolation to 
those of our friends who are afraid that the movement in 
Biblical interpretation known as the Higher Criticism may 
tend to weaken interest in such missions as those to which 
this corporate body is committed ; for the speaker I have 
quoted, more than most ministerial men, has been for years 
under its influence. The fact is that Higher Criticism, as it 
is called, like everything else, acts differently on different 
constitutions. What is one man's meat is another man's 
poison. We may be comforted, however, with the very latest 
word that has come from the very centre of the conflict : 
"Jesus was the beginner of a new Era in the spiritual history 
of man. He gave men a new God and a new ideal of 
humanity. For us men of the 20th century it is either Christ 
or nothing. Either one believes in Christ's God or none. 
What forbids the hope that some day Christ's ideal of society 
may prevail ?" From the very heart of fermenting, sceptical 
and speculative Germany that word has come to us. Is it 
not the word of all words we most need for the time in which 
our lot is cast ? If the Higher Criticism has driven us out 
from the distant doctrinal outworks, which we have built for 
our resting places, into the impregnable citadel itself, no 
harm has come to us. Starving theological prodigals, we 
have found our way back into our Father's embrace and into 



20 Eiilargement Through Service 

the communion of our elder brother, who, unlike the brother 
in the parable, has come out to meet us and greet us. Can 
we doubt that closer fellowship with the Christ, intellectual 
and sympathetic, will be shown in the enlargement of our 
manhood, and that that enlargement will know no limit short 
of that enthusiasm of humanity which foreign missions 
embody ? It is true that great truths need great men to 
incarnate them. It is true that great tasks spring out of 
great visions. The vision of a redeemed humanity is mag- 
nificent. Anything greater is inconceivable. Small minds 
cannot attain unto it. If the vision of Christ had not fallen 
upon our spirits with convincing and converting power, 
should we ever have dared to enter upon the gigantic enter- 
prise to which we are invited? To be satisfied with the 
world as it is would be to consent to a sort of semi- civilized 
barbarism. It would be the dreariest form of pessimism. It 
would be the dolefullest form of unbelief in the universality 
of Divine grace. It would be'proof positive that some of the 
richest and most hope-inspiring passages of Holy Writ had 
never revealed their heart to us — for has not our Lord 
ascended on high "that he might fill all things." "Greater 
works than these shall ye do, because I go to my Father." 
"That at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, of those in 
heaven and those on earth and those under the earth." It 
would be the most flagrant practical denial of the limitless- 
ness of that Divine presence which as far back as three thou- 
sand years ago elect souls perceived, — "Whither shall I go 
from thy presence, whither shall I flee from thy spirit ; if I 
ascend up into heaven, thou art there ; if I make my bed in 
hell, behold thou art there ; if I take the wings of the morn- 
ing and flee to the uttermost part of the seas, even there shall 
thy hand lead me and thy right hand uphold me. ' ' Wherever 
the spirit of God is there surely his servants have a right to 
go. 

In all conditions of life there are dark days for us all, 
nights of deep, dense gloom as well as mornings of su nny 
brightness, but whatever the weather that encloses us, the 
Sun is shining in the heavens, controlling it and using it. 



Enlargement Through Service 21 

We have had no such revelation as would enable us to turn 
Tennyson's faith-dream into dogmatic affirmation: 

"Oh yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill, 
To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood ; 

"That nothing walks with aimless feet; 
That not one life shall be destroy'd, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete." 

Yet we can, I think, hopefully accept what follows : 

"Behold we know not anything; 
I can but trust that good shall. fall 
At last — far off — at last, to all, 
And every winter change to spring." 

For why? A multitude which no man can number, out 
of every kingdom and nation shall call Him Lord. For 
why? "He shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be 
satisfied, ' ' and what will satisfy Him will surely satisfy us. 



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